Rosie O’Donnell Reveals She Missed Birth of Granddaughter by an Hour

Rosie O’Donnell may have hopped on a plane as soon as she got the call that her daughter was in labor, but she still missed the birth of her first grandchild.

Appearing on the TODAY Show on Wednesday, the former The View co-host opened up about the birth of her granddaughter, Skylar Rose, last month, revealing that she missed the little one’s entrance into the world by an hour.

“It was really trippy, I have to say,” she said. “She called me from Wisconsin — Chels my daughter lives there with her partner Jake — and she called and said, ‘I’m in labor,’ and I got on a plane and I missed the birth by, like an hour. But she’s happy.”

Baby Skylar was born to the Tony Award winner’s 21-year-old daughter Chelsea, whom she adopted as a baby with her then-wife Kelli Carpenter, and Jacob Bourassa. O’Donnell announced the news on her Twitter account on Dec. 19.

“my daughter chels – jake – and skylar rose my first grandchild !!!” she wrote at the time, sharing a series of images of her granddaughter.

Speaking on the TODAY Show, O’Donnell couldn’t help but gush about the newly expanded family of three.

“Just to see my daughter so happy and so, sort of content, and this guy who loves her so much, loving that baby,” she said. “Now she feels, I think a lot of adopted kids feel like until they have their own child, they don’t have that unit to look at someone who looks like them to see genetically that they have their own kind of history, so it was really a very beautiful thing.”

O’Donnell and Skylar have notably had a rocky relationship that played out in the public eye. In August of 2015, a then 17-year-old Chelsea ran away from home and was found four weeks later at her then-boyfriend’s home in New Jersey. After claiming that O’Donnell had kicked her out of their home, she then went to Wisconsin to live with her birth mother, Deanna Micoley, after she turned 18.

Though the years that followed were filled with a bitter back-and-forth feud between O’Donnell and Chelsea, they began to reconcile after Chelsea discovered she was pregnant. Initially stating that her mother would “not be in my child’s life,” her tone later softened and the two found common ground and were said to be “talking again” and had been brought “back together.”